


life is just this

by Liar_of_Lesbos



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: 4x13, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Gen, Mental Health Issues, i'm a simple girl i just want emotions to be discussed, look q and eliot are definitely traumatized and q has subtle but hurt reactions to touch now, since this comes right after 4x12 q and alice are in a relationship, there is definitely no cheating involved just talk about emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-24 00:45:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18560497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liar_of_Lesbos/pseuds/Liar_of_Lesbos
Summary: Despite how much the show-runners seem to love the musical episode of Buffy, I think they forgot the climax: “life’s not a song / life isn’t bliss / life is just this / it’s living."





	life is just this

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to [el-and-q](https://el-and-q.tumblr.com/) for volunteering to beta and letting me pester them about the ending. as always, thanks to [devilishdetales](https://devilishdetales.tumblr.com/). even if her distaste of spoilers kept her from editing, she still had to listen to me whine as i wrote.

Quentin’s love wasn’t enough. It’s true that the flower in the Drowned Garden had bloomed for him, and that the leaves had worked. Alice and him had been able to touch the Reservoir without being cursed. Josh had been cured, human, and for some reason very excited about having fish magicks. 

It had taken Margo only some well-timed whacks (with Penny 23’s help) to free Julia and Eliot of their parasitic invaders. The monsters’ essences had flown straight into the spirit-catching bottle, and a magically juiced-up Alice and Quentin had sealed them tightly inside with Mayakovsky’s Incorporate Bond. Their adventuring party had dropped the monsters back off in Castle Blackspire, where surely the monsters would prove to never be a problem again.

But of course, nothing Quentin ever solved remained solved. Mendings who? While they were busy, you know, saving all the life in the multiverse, Everett was stealing the entire power of the Reservoir to become a god for some fucking reason. And as he strode away to do… something… with that enormity of power, the leaves from Quentin’s feelings flower in the Drowned Garden proved themselves to be an imperfect cure to Martin’s curse on the Reservoir.

It was Margo who noticed first. Well, it was probably Josh who noticed first, since he did start turning back into a fish, but it was Margo who had had a voice and also the mobility to do something about the metamorphosis. As her lover distorted and collapsed into a tiny fish shape (maybe this one was finally the Fillorian Fucking Fish instead of the Fillorian Dying Fish? A girl could hope), she delicately displaced Eliot’s head from her lap, fingers lingering briefly in his still dirty hair. She put Josh back into his fishbowl--thankfully they hadn’t gotten rid of it yet--took the rosemary and cardamom focaccia he’d been baking from the oven, and sauntered over to the room Q and Alice had shacked up in. 

“Clothes on, lovebirds,” Margo demanded. Quentin and Alice were, in fact, still fully clothed, leaning on each other at the foot of the be, just barely awake, and Alice gave Margo quite what Quentin felt was one of her scariest glares--not quite as terrifyingly cool as her flippant “shut the fuck up” glare, but more likely to get him to actually stop what he was doing. Margo did not seem to care. “Here’s a fun one: Josh is a fish. Again. Now what the hell is that about, Quentin?”

“I don’t… I don’t know? Does this mean we’re all going to be fish? But... the flower did sprout for me when I talked to it about Fillory? So that means I proved my love for it or whatever, right?” Quentin hedged. 

“Apparently not, dipshit. Figure out how to save my boyfriend before you’re also a fish, and I get to sauté and eat you.”

“It’s just... they said it was up to me and my love of Fillory. That my love was what we needed.”

Margo snorted, and Quentin remembered the look she’d given him when he’d asked her why magic couldn’t run on love. “Yeah, I’m calling bullshit. Who was it that told you that, Q?”

“Plover? And that Librarian, Zelda? Apparently Everett told her…” 

“What the hell do the Librarians or the pedophile know about actual people? The fee-fee flower wanted, what, to find anyone who actually likes Fillory?”

“Well, Plover said it was ‘someone who loves Fillory truly.’”

“And your Fillory obsession didn’t make the cut,” Margo said. There was a boa constrictor around Quentin’s heart, and he thought he might’ve felt the snake begin to worm its way up his throat too. “Alright then, new tactic. Let’s try Fen and Eliot.”

Alice had taken his hand. The small comfort only reminded him that for all she’d believed in him, it hadn’t worked. “Not you?” she asked.

Margo laughed. “Honey, I don’t think that I owe Fillory like those two do. I know that Fillory owes me.”

Margo shouted for Penny 23. Things began to move at breakneck pace, as they always did when Margo took charge. Margo went to track down Fen, but she left Quentin to wake up Eliot with very explicit threats to his manhood and his life if she found Eliot at all injured or distressed when she returned with Fen.

With a final concerned glance at Alice, who nodded sharply to him, Quentin padded over to the couch where Eliot was sleeping, still as death save for the slight rise and fall of his chest. Once upon a time, watching Eliot sleep had brought Quentin the kind of nameless comfort that could drift Q back to peaceful rest after the fear of a nightmare. Now Quentin could see only the Monster’s affectless threat in Eliot’s slumbering face; even having his overlong hair pulled back into a small ponytail was not enough to distinguish the two. 

How many times before had Quentin reached out to wake Eliot from his sleep? With a gently tousling hand, or a kiss to the head, or even a frustrated tug on an arm, to a hogged blanket. 

“Eliot,” he whispered. “Eliot, I’m sorry, but you need to wake up.”

Eliot’s eyes fluttered beneath their lids and he grunted, but he did not wake.

“Eliot,” Quentin said. “Eliot, please.” Would he have to touch him after all?

But Eliot’s eyes snapped open and he hurled his body upward, gasping for air. Quentin watched as the man he’d spent a lifetime with fought for control of his strained lungs, until Eliot was sure enough of his body to slide his gaze to meet Quentin’s. 

Quentin want to close his eyes, but he kept himself steady while he explained, his voice soft, “We needed more magical power to bind the Monster and his sister so tightly that they couldn’t escape. There was… a Reservoir of magic, stolen by the Library, hidden beneath Whitespire. But the container was cursed by Martin Chatwin when he was just a kid, so that whoever touched it turned into a fish. The fix was the garden right outside, that grows flowers based on the feelings of those nearby. Supposedly if one truly loves Fillory, a flower will bloom that cures the curse.”

“So? Who do we have the pleasure of sauteing and eating as a fish?” Eliot’s voice scratched.

“Right now, just Josh, but Alice and I will probably end up in fishbowls soon if we don’t fix this.” Did Eliot even know who Everett was? “ And Margo already made that joke to me.”

“Joke? Dear, it’s simply a matter of taste.” The smile that graced Eliot’s face was wry, so much more like himself than Quentin had seen in so long that it was like Eliot was returning to life again, resurrected. This time Quentin couldn’t keep his eyes open as he tried to put a lid on the surge of emotions. “And how many more secrets is my own castle going to hide? Well, Margo’s now.”

Quentin let out a breath. “Right now I think it’s Fen’s, actually? From what Margo said?”

“That has to be a story.” he said. “But why are you telling me? Isn’t this a problem for you to solve, Fillory boy?”

“Already tried. Didn’t, uh, didn’t work. Apparently Fillory thinks I don’t love it enough, so...”

“Q--” Eliot’s eyes were tender, too tender. 

“Margo thought you and Fen might have better luck,” Quentin said quickly. “So she’s off getting Fen to bring to the Drowned Garden.” 

Eliot looked up at him for a long moment, and the world was held in suspension, only the noise of their friends--Julia quiet, Penny amused, Kady sarcastic, Margo cutting through the rest--before Eliot acquiesced. “Alright. I can give it a try.”

* * *

Eliot knelt beside the flower patch and closed his eyes, Fen one step behind him in the action. Quentin didn’t know what he was thinking, but in the silence, Quentin couldn’t help but think that he looked both like the Eliot he had once known and like something else entirely. Not the Monster; the Monster was all apathy and deadened eyes until some small but intense measure of emotion caused little distortions in his bland aspect. This was Eliot’s face, lived in with emotion, but more sincere and serious in expression than he ever remembered El being. Doing a task to save Fillory without irony or indecision. Maybe he was too tired for ironic detachment; Q certainly was. 

Eliot’s hands were curling in at the seam of the shoddy jeans that the Monster had stuffed his long legs into. Fen’s fingers found their way into El’s. Quentin wondered if he should take Alice’s hand, but the air felt too tense to permit the touch of another.

The once and present High Kings of Fillory didn’t speak, didn’t lecture the barren stem like Q had. They just held hands, and Eliot opened his eyes--his jaw clenching in the way it always had when his feelings were strong enough to slip from behind his masks--and he looked Fen directly in the eyes. She smiled, the same sweet innocent little thing she’d had when she’d first married Eliot, a lifetime of suffering ago. 

And then the flower bloomed, not slowly and timidly, but bursting from the ground like a god of spring had commanded it to awaken. This flower was shockingly bright, hot pink, and nearly drooping with the weight of its own heavy petals. 

Eliot squeezed Fen’s hand once and let go. Fen plucked off three leaves and quickly rose to her feet. Even as she was pressing the leaf into his hand, Quentin was watching Eliot rock back onto his butt, jamming his eyes shut again like he was trying to push out the very possibility of an outside world. Who was this Eliot, as languid and smooth in his movements as ever but clad in the Monster’s too-normal clothes, bags under his eyes and his whole frame shaking but completely sober, his beautiful neck arched in a way the Monster never would but his face contorted in honest pain in a way Eliot never let himself be?

Someone was saying Quentin’s name. He ate the leaf, and all the magic which had threatened to take him over settled down inside of him. 

He could hear Alice’s desperate gulps of air as the magic in her shift and sorted. Then a hand on his shoulder, from what felt like behind him, and he stopped breathing. He could feel the muscles in his back tense, his legs lock, before he remembered there was no more Monster to appease, to let him be touched. 

“Please let go,” he whispered. The hand freed itself from his shoulder and whatever strings were holding him still came undone.

Quentin could spy Eliot giving Margo a look. They could still share those? He couldn’t see Margo’s response, but he could hear the shuffling of feet moving outside and the soft mutter of Alice’s voice growing more distant. 

When all he could hear was the drip of water in the cave, the rustle of the flowers spurting from the ground and then decaying, and Eliot’s now-quiet breaths, Quentin thrust himself to the floor, whether in an act of rage or grief, he didn’t know. 

“Why did it work for you, and not for me? Is my love for Fillory not pure enough? What about me is not enough for this stupid land and its stupid magic garden and its stupid magic?”

“Q,” Eliot said. He was crouched down now in front of Quentin now. “What do you love about Fillory?”

Well that wasn’t a no. “I love that Chatwin’s Torrent heals a broken man. That Martin and Jane can climb on top of a giant, woolen horse and see the entirety of the world spread out at their feet. That a badger can accept you warmly into its home. That Fillory always opens its doors for Jane when she needed it. Eliot, Fillory is magic.”

Eliot sighed and sat down next to Quentin so that their shoulders were touching, but tucked his hand around his waist. “I told Fillory once that I hated it, when it's god had told me once that I loved Fillory and I had agreed that it was my home.

“But Quentin, I hate Fillory. I hate that Fen’s father, that patriarchal bastard, promised her to a random man who he had no way of knowing would show, or would be a good man. And yet I still love Fen, who never abandoned her bumbling, uninterested husband and who could feel empathy even for the bitch who stole her child. I hate that Margo had to fight for every scrap of authority she has while mine was gifted to me when I was too drunk to care. But I love that Fillory voted her into office anyway, off the hope she gave them for their forbidden loves to be accepted. I hate those books that are just excuses for the violent crimes of Plover and his sister against innocent children, but I love that it brought you and Julia closer, that they helped keep your head above the water when you were drowning. I hate that Fillory once took away our friends to give us a life together, then took away our life together but returned us to our friends. But I love that we had that life, that we had Ari and that Teddy grew up to be a good man and that we had each other, for all that I fucked that up too.

“Q, the world is dark and big and terrible. You’ve been trying to love things like you did when you were a kid, but we’re grown-ups now. Kind of. And loving like an adult means knowing that the bad is there and loving anyway. Loving with the bad, or because of it. It’s not always easy, darling, but then what in life is? Love isn’t about seeing only the good in something, because then you’re not seeing what you love.”

Quentin had been looking at Eliot, mostly in astonishment, and now Eliot met his eyes squarely. “I ran away from you once because I thought you were too good to be true. Or, at least, that you were too good for me. I still think you’re too good for me, even knowing you as well as I do, but… Q, I don’t really know how to be happy; I’m too used to just surviving.” 

“I’ve had a lot of time--a whole lot, not much else but--lately to think about the mistakes that I’ve made. About when I’ve acted out of fear instead of doing what was smart, or true, or would make us happy. When I told you we wouldn’t work, I was afraid. Not smart or true or trying to let us be happy.”

“Eliot. What are you saying? That you… that you love me?” 

“Of course I love you, Q. I’ve loved you since your first semester at Brakebills, and we both know that.” Eliot took a second to duck his head and pulled his fingers through his knotted mess of a ponytail. Quentin wondered if he could take Eliot’s trembling hand as it smoothed the frizzy strands. “Ah, fuck. I meant to do this later, when we’d both had a chance to, you know, recover. Like have just a minute to ourselves to relax and probably to drink, and maybe even to think things through a bit.” 

Eliot shifted his face slightly so he could give Quentin another of his wry smiles. “What I’m telling you now is that I’m here. And if you ever want to go further? If you want a real relationship? I’m here for that, if you still are.”

“I don’t know what to do with that, El.” The flowers on Quentin’s side of the garden had stilled, not growing or dying, not even shifting in the Reservoir’s breeze. “I didn’t think I’d ever get you back, let alone that you cared about me like that.”

“Hey, Q, baby, I know. I’ve been thinking about telling you this since the moment I escaped my own brain to tell you I’m alive, and I still don’t know what we’ll be, or know completely what I want.

“What I did know was that I wanted to apologize, to tell you that I was a coward when I rejected you, but Q, you make me braver. We had fifty years to prove we worked as life partners, and I think it’s time I stop ignoring the evidence, but I do know that my cowardice means that I probably missed that chance at something more. So I’m just here, whatever it is that you want. And I’m sorry.”

And Quentin couldn’t hold himself back anymore. The tears were falling--truly he felt it a manly showing from an apparent grown-up--and his breath was coming out ragged. His hand found its way to Eliot’s face. How long had it been since he’d let himself touch this beloved face? The stubble was scratchy under his soft fingertips in a way so familiar, even if El’s beard was longer then he liked to keep it in this timeline, in a time without their cottage.

“Okay, El. Okay. No matter what, I love you, you know?”

And Eliot gently removed his face from Q’s hand. Q keened slightly and tried to follow, but Eliot’s fingers met his own while he pressed a soft kiss onto Q’s forehead. 

Q remembered setting out on his boating quest without Eliot, the way Eliot had held him in his arms and kissed his forehead and told him to leave anyway, and felt something he hadn’t since his own personal depression monster had almost nagged him into the sea: hope. A real hope that maybe this world was one he could do more than survive and save and inevitably die for some world-ending cause that he’d volunteer-tomatoed into yet again, but one that he could live in, one in which he could love wholly and without restraint. 

“You know I thought that I’m supposed to comforting you, Eliot, not the other way around.”

“Oh,” Eliot said, sighing heartily. “don’t worry. You’re going to need to do that later, definitely. I’m… not a hundred percent sure that my limbs are still my limbs? Also, Margo said that the Monster might have gotten me addicted to meth, which I really thought I’d escaped when I left farm country. And I haven’t talked to actual people for… some period of time. I was a hermit, but in my head. That can't have been healthy. I doubt that it’s been easy hanging it with murder!me, but you’ll have your chance.”

Quentin could feel a smile overcome his face. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything, El.”

**Author's Note:**

> I think there are various ways to interpret the speech that Quentin made at the Drowned Garden in 4x12, but as a philosophy to apply to life and relationships instead of, potentially, art? It offended my sensibilities as someone who is trying to come out of a deep depression (one that I’ve always managed like Quentin did, by clinging to narratives and storytelling and fantasy worlds), and as someone who has been on the receiving end of idealized notions of who I am. In the narrative of the show, Fillory is a reality, an actual part of the world that Quentin must contend with, and he can’t keep expecting it to be his childhood fantasy world, his fictional escape. He has to live with Fillory in its actualities, as lovely and as awful as everything else in life. 
> 
> I'd love to talk about any of this, including our disappointment with the finale, with any of y'all over at my [tumblr](http://liaroflesbos.tumblr.com/).


End file.
